I visit the beautiful waterfront of Kirkland, Washington to get some breakthrough insights on athletic training and recovery from Joel Jamieson of 8WeeksOut.com

Months prior to our meeting in summer 2018, my mind was blown by an article Joel wrote on his website called “All Pain, No Gain: Why The High Intensity Training Obsession Has Failed Us All.” In it, Joel reframes our basic notion of recovery from a static activity to something that actually requires energy to achieve. If you envision your weekly energy expenditure in a pie chart, you devote slices to workouts, your career, coaching soccer, whatever, but we must also acknowledge that refreshing brain neurons and restocking muscle glycogen require energy to perform!  

The harder your train, the more energy you need to devote to recovery. Unfortunately, athletes usually think in the narrow dimension of training hard and then crashing on the couch to “recover,” or worse, training hard and heading to their high-stress desk job to “recover.” What happens when you disrespect the energy requirement of recovery is you get into what Joel refers to as “recovery debt.” Listen to Joel’s show on the Primal Endurance podcast where he details these concepts. 

Joel brings some more mind-blowing insights to this show when he discusses his interesting concept of Rebound Training. Here again, fitness enthusiasts are compelled to reframe our notion of recovery from inactivity to something perhaps more effective—distinct physical exercise that is designed to activate the parasympathetic nervous system and tone down the usually predominant sympathetic nervous system activity. Some more interesting food for thought: Unlike primal humans, exercise and food are no longer inextricably linked. This royally screws up our genetically hardwired dopamine reward system. In short, when we are inactive and eat in modern life, we short circuit our motivation to work out.   

Joel is a longtime enthusiast of Heart Rate Variability and his new app Morpheus App (find in App store and start using it!) allows you to aggregate assorted training and lifestyle factors, including HRV, to auto-generate a Recovery score. Knowing your state of recovery, you can make more informed training decisions and stay away from the dreaded recovery debt.  

Here are some examples of Rebound Training: Extensive breathing, stretching, and mobility exercises to get blood flowing without stressing the body; Doing only the concentric portion of a deadlift, then dropping the weight to prevent muscle soreness. Here you get the nervous system activation without the muscle damage; Doing very short intervals (say 10-12 seconds) and then allowing long recovery period (like 60 seconds) where you make a devoted effort to lower your heart rate quickly (Yes, amazingly, you can get better and better a this skill! Work on it in the gym and then you can use the same tips to control your stress response in the traffic jam or workplace). Joel coaches world champion MMA fighters, but every fitness enthusiast can learn to make recovery an absolute top priority and do it the right way. Since recording this show with Joel, I have altered my approach to recovery workouts to integrate some of the rebound training techniques instead of just sit around and wait for my muscles and body to feel better and then hit it hard again. It freakin’ works man! Get outside and move and you will recover faster.  

Joel is a big-time helicopter pilot so you may get a fun outtake where he is talking about the importance of relaxing and going with the flow in whatever you do, including landing a freaking helicopter on a random mountaintop in the Pacific Northwest, which is one of Joel’s hobbies. After the show, Joel was headed out into the beautiful Pacific Northwest sunset for a quick helicopter trip to Vashon Island. Four hours by car, 30 minutes by helicopter. More time to recover! 

TIMESTAMPS: 

Helicopter flying calls for relaxing. [00:08:31]  

Recovery actually takes much energy. [00:14:09]  

Where does heart rate variability stand in your method? [00:17:58]  

Do you think smartphone technology is accurate? [00:19:27]  

What are you putting into Morpheus besides the HRV number? [00:20:27]  

When you HRV is high, it means your body is trying to recover. [00:25:12]  

Under mental stress, the inflammatory markers are elevated. [00:29:26]  

A hardcore endurance athlete would want to see an upper trend in the baseline. [00:31:43]  

Aerobic fitness is more important than strength training.  [00:34:45]  

What is worth expending energy for? [00:37:28]  

Portion size is a big problem when eating out. [00:42:51]  

What is rebound training? [00:44:18]  

What is your reason for working out in the gym and are you using that time well? [00:50:50]  

What kind of training does Jamieson do? [00:52:38]  

So the idea that recovery is just resting is not correct. You can develop the ability to turn off stress. [00:55:55]  

Recovery is where things actually happen. [01:01:09]  

LINKS: 

Morpheus App:  

Joel Jamieson 

8WeeksOut 

LISTEN:

Get Over Yourself Podcast

Brad: Welcome to the get over yourself podcast. This is Brad Kearns. I cover health, fitness, peak performance, personal growth, relationships, happiness and longevity, so slow down, take a deep breath, take a cold plunge and pursue your competitive goals in all areas of life with great intensity and passion, but release your attachment to the outcome and learned to have fun along the way. That’s the theme of this show. Here we go,

Brad: Hi listeners, my guest Joel Jamison is going to blow your mind. He’s gonna alter your perspective and get you to rethink some of the basic notions of athletic training and recovery. This is the first time I met him, but we did a great show a months ago on my primal endurance podcast channel, so go check that out where he talks about these amazing concepts of the constrained model of energy expenditure and recovery based training. The idea that recovery takes energy in and of itself. A my thick head just didn’t really grasp this with the profound appreciation that I did after reading his article called All Pain and No Gain, so you have to check him out over at eightweeksout.com. That’s the number eight weeks out.com. He’s been deep into the MMA fighting scene for many years. I believe that’s how he first got his major impact because he called these guys out. This is many years ago now where he basically addressed the MMA community and he said, hey, all y’all are trained in too hard. You’re sparring too much in practice, you’re getting broken down, burnt out, and I have a better way, and I think he was initially criticized and then wow. Made his major impact. He’s training the top top fighters. He has a world champion in his camp. You can see his pictures and the stories on eight weeks out.com, but the concept that the harder we train, the more energy we have to devote to recovery will slap you in the face if you sit back and reflect upon it and again, as we covered that topic briefly, but then got into another profound insight that he calls “rebound training” where instead of just laying around after hard workouts to recover, which is what my mentality has been my entire athletic career. You know what I’m saying? Like, yeah, we wrote 100 miles yesterday, so today I’m going to eat chips and watch movies on the couch because that is the smartest athlete to recover.

Brad: He actually has this concept of rebound training where you can get into the gym or wherever and do specific purposeful exercises that trigger the stimulation of the parasympathetic nervous system, the rest and digest recovery functions as opposed to the over domination of the sympathetic nervous system, the fight or flight that occurs in general everyday hectic life and also when we train in a devoted manner. So wow, this was just a profound insight for me to think that you go in the gym, you do some breathing and stretching and mobility exercises. You do some purposeful things such as, let’s say doing a ten second all out interval and then recovering for the next 60 seconds and during that time, making a concerted effort to lower your heart rate and by becoming skilled at this parasympathetic activation, right to lower your heart rate. You can get good at this during the busy work day or when you’re in a traffic jam and you become skilled at activating parasympathetic function and speeding up your recovery time.

Brad: A quote from Joel’s article about rebound training, “the most important thing you can do is to shift your body into what I call the recovery state. Within 24 to 48 hours following a high intensity session.” He also got me improving my understanding about heart rate variability because ah, I didn’t realize this concept before, but a high HRV, which is widely acknowledged to be the chance to go out there and train hard because you’re fully recovered, might mean that your parasympathetic nervous system is working really hard because you still haven’t fully recovered. Trip out on that. We know that if your HRV is low, that you’re not supposed to train because you’re tired, but if your HRV is abnormally high, it also might be an appropriate time for recovery. Ha, I’m telling you, this is cutting edge right here. Listen to the show. This is a cool dude.

Brad: He’s a big time helicopter pilot. That’s his hobby. His passion. He showed me some videos on his desktop where he’s flying around in the mountains of Washington and notices a mountaintop that’s bald, you know, no trees on it, and he just laid that puppy down in the middle of the forest just for a quick landing, having a little fun, blowing some dirt around and just after we recorded the show, nearing sunset and the beautiful summers of the Pacific northwest, he was about to take off on his helicopter and pop over to a nearby island where his boat was parked for a weekend of chilling; a helicopter flight time, 30 minutes if you want to do the same. Driving through the crazy Seattle traffic and writing the ferries. It was a four hour journey. So what a way to travel in the helicopter and he gives some interesting insights about the importance of relaxing and going with the flow. When he was talking about his helicopter piloting. So per my mission on the show, I pushed the record button. It was before we started in with the formal show about fitness and peak performance, and you’ll get some interesting little tidbits about the importance of relaxing and going with the flow even when you’re doing a life or death maneuver like landing a helicopter. Let’s listen to Joel Jamison in Beautiful Kirkland, Washington.

Joel and Brad: We learned to fly a helicopter or an airplane for that amount of your attention. You’re very tight. Oh, should control the hell out of the thing, right? Really feel tense and tight. I’d make these large, abrupt, controlling and the helicopters all over because it’s so important, and so the closer you get to the ground, the more afraid you get it. Right, so your natural instinct to try to hold on tighter and tighter, you hold onto the cycle is what controls the. The main, the cyclic control left to right, forward, backward. The tighter your whole onto that, or even the pedals as well. The more you over control the whole helicopter, you ended up just getting into the whirlpool of death and the more you actually relax, the smaller your inputs become, the better you actually fly. So it’s a. it’s a, it’s a really clear picture of how important it is to be able to just relax and go with the moment or the moment rather than trying to force things to happen because you literally can feel the helicopter very enough or he’s got to get over yourself and the helicopter flying and that’s one thing that teaches you is that you’ve got to relax.

Joel and Brad: Especially. We do a lot of emergency training, so engine basically, and we practice gliding and spots. You don’t have to turn it off. He disconnected from the main rotor blades and you practice basically gliding into spots and of course people’s natural. Anything is to tense up because the helicopters dropping in 2000 feet a minute. I mean it’s serious. You drop in a helicopter training session, 2,500 feet a minute. Let’s see how you do here, man. Then you’ll get your license, but it’s just all part of practicing for that to happen. So if there was an emergency, you could. You could handle it, but a lot of that stuff is just learning how to just relax and deal with the situation versus trying to panic enforcement cleaner.

Brad: Well, I could see an athlete to relax, relax. It’s just a matter of life or death. That’s a little tough.

Joel: It teaches a valuable lesson because you relaxed, you fly better, much better actually.

Brad: \Now, do you have people that aren’t gonna make it past that where um, you know, they’re not cut out for flying and you have to say, Hey man, I noticed you’d never relaxed.

Joel: So flight instructor. Honestly, because I don’t want, I don’t want to have get paid to have people to kill me or try to kill me. At least that’s my instruction is right. It’s getting paid to help someone killed themselves. They learn how to fly mostly to now. I mean have definitely flown with a range of pilots and some people are much, much better at relaxing. Just letting, letting themselves go and just folks on the control and being loose and flexible and some people just never really quite get it. They overcontrolled they overthink and they can’t process the information as quickly because that’s the other thing is it’s a lot of information being processed. A lot of times you, you’re not just flying but you’re navigating your community and you’re doing all these things, pay attention to the instruments and the engine, um, and be able to process that and fly and make decisions is a skill that gets developed over time. And I considered having a conversation and helicopter listened to two different ATC conversations going on at once while I’m navigating. It’s a lot of things to process, but your brain can do it. It just takes practice, right? It’s like training.

Brad: Do you think the, like the simulators and the video games really would help these days?

Joel: You know, maybe to some extent they’ll never simulate the actual control factor or feelings that you get from being in the air. But you know, as far as some of the information processing, there’s probably some carryover. And there’s actually some, you know, at the top level of, of aviation. It’s all simulator training. So my, my cousin plays Lear jets and now jet called Challenger. These are three to five, 10, $20,000,000 jets and the first time you fly them is literally a real aircraft. After you’ve done all the training in the simulator, then you just go fly it and you’re ready to go. If there’s no actual training of the flying in the aircraft and training is all done, the stimulator, then you go fly the aircraft here, get your type rating and you’re done because it’s $5,000 an hour and no one’s gonna spend an hour to train you. So you simulator for $2,000 an hour, whatever. The stimulator. So expensive. Very expensive. Yeah. All the. All the training for the high level aircraft, all the commercial jets, that’s all simulator, all 100 percent simulator training, but those simulators are real

Brad: serious million dollar simulator or something.

Joel: They are three D either complete dimensional and they rotate and shift and rock and roll and panoramic views. I mean they simulate everything and that’s what all the actual pilots are trained on and kept carrying on. So no doubt and stimulation plays a role. That’s just a question of like, is your xbox really know? Maybe, maybe not.

Brad: I suppose if you, um, if you could keep cool under the pressure that you faced in the simulator rather than freaked because it’s real life. There’s no reason why not, unless you get your central nervous system.

Joel: Interference scenario base training is what a lot of the similar stuff. For example, uh, you know, when slowly went down in the Hudson and that was a miracle. The reality is they trained for that kind of stuff all the time. Like he made the right decision because he trained and stimulators and had engine failures that may be one in $100 million. They never happened. But he trained him to and then they actually did happen, right? I mean double bird strike is so rare to lose two engines like that, but he paid for it simulator and put it down as a result. So that’s what we do. And see what there’s a train feeds ridiculous scenarios that are highly unlikely, but when you’re talking to millions of flights, highly unlikely it’s going to happen sooner or later.

Joel: Yeah. Or you better do it. Exactly.

Brad: So did they train them with like getting their blood alcohol at two point two, three, like those guys from the US Air and see if they can still fly?

Joel: No, no, I don’t think so. No. The simulator. Yeah.

Brad: Uh, so I pushed the record button, Joel, because uh, if you know about the, the, the theme of the get over yourself podcast. We’re trying to, we’re trying to get real and cut through their performance aspect and have some fun. So I figured, you know, this, this flying thing, I forgot about that element when we talked about before. But you know, I, I got you on the um, the, the primal blueprint show because this article that you wrote, it just blew my mind this eight weeks out website and then the article was All Pain, No Gain and just opening up an entirely different point of view on recovery. And the main insight that for some reason never hit my thick head prior to that was that recovery actually takes energy. And in the, in the triathlon realm, I remember we’d just train our brains out until we were exhausted. Then we get on the couch and we say, I’m done with my training now I’m recovering and I’ll get back up again and whatever day and do it again, but never applying that concept of like the pie slice and the wedge of pie that you have to allocate to recovery. And so I went back and read it again just for fun to just get excited about our personal meeting here in beautiful Kirkland, Washington. And again, like this quote popped out at me where you said, the harder you train, the more energy you have to devote to recovery. And I, I’d never really thought about that either. That’s like this, this, this beast that keeps growing the more you train. So that’s our starting point, man.

Joel: I think it’s one of those things that just kind of hit me over the years and uh, you know, I hate to say old, but the older I get, the more you see it firsthand, the more athletes you work with or that are aging and it put the years in, the more you just see over and over again the same story. It’s the story of I trained really hard and I was young and I was able to perform at a high level and then I kept trying to do it and I kept trying to push my body harder and harder and harder. Sooner or later I started to break down and you just see this again. You see the story over and over again. So I’d been measuring heart rate variability for since about 2002, I would say 2003. I was one of the earliest coaches I would say in North America to use it.

Brad: So does that mean you had to do the giant machine?

Joel: Six electrodes, six electrodes. Now we got our smartphones. Yeah. Two on the ankles to, on the risks. And the actually had seventh and you had to have the chest and one on the forehead. So yeah, it was a lot of work, but it was very instrumental in the scene. Like Holy Shit, you know, like people’s recovery is so much worse than I expected it to be a. because my inherent thought, most people inherent thought is like, Oh, the gym itself is my biggest stressor. Right? They think like if I go out for workout for an hour or two, that’s the most stressful thing I do to myself, but the reality is it’s the other 21, 22, 23, 24 hours a day where you’re working or you’re dealing with family stress or you’re dealing with just life. Those things have a huge impact on recovery because they are also energy intensive and your body can only produce so much energy a day, so if you’re redirecting and all your energy towards just dealing with life and working in there and mentally doing stressful things, it sabotages your recovery. And so I started to see just the impact of people working at Microsoft and the deadline would coming up or college students studying for finals or know people going through divorce or relationship problems or dealing with, you know, family deaths or just things that would come up in everyday life. You would just see how much of an impact that has on people’s recovery and you’d see that as someone gets older, their ability to tolerate those things got worse and worse and worse and worse. So as their energy was going towards those things and that recovery, they couldn’t compensate the way they could when they were in the 19 twenties or know even sometimes already 30 days. You’d just see this diminishing effect of their body to handle all the things that you throw at it. And so just, you know, seeing that happen over and over again and then seeing that happen in my own training, my own life, you know, that’s the. When I was stressed out from business or I had my mom went through a stroke and I can see all these things happened to me and just seeing, you know, again, the impact of, of life and training and stress and all these things. It just shows you that your, your, you know, it needs to devote energy towards recovery. And if you don’t give it that time and you don’t give it that energy, you pay the price. Sooner or later, it’s just, it’s a, it’s a ticking time bomb. Really.

Brad: So where does heart rate variability stand in, in your, a respect of how well that indicates your state of recovery?

Joel: Well, you know, I think as a single metric, it’s, it’s the best single metric we have. Um, now the, the new system have got morpheus, looks at sleep, it looks at training, looks at activity in some other markers. I think help fine tune that.

Brad: That’s your APP. Morpheus. Morpheus,

Joel: yeah. It’s designed to essentially take all those data points and give you a recovery score versus HRV was just kind of gives you a number and expects you have to kind of figure out what that number means, which is the trickier part of HRV but I think as a single number it’s a, it’s a very powerful marker of recovery because, um, it’s given you an indication of the parasympathetic nervous system, which if your listeners are too familiar with that, it’s, you know, if the branch autonomic nervous system that drives energy into a tissue repair and tissue regeneration and digestion. I mean, it basically is the recovery branch and a lot of senses and so it’s given you a marker of where that system is functioning, so that tells us, hey, if that system is a certain state, we know the body is trying to devote energy back into recovery. If we noticed a different state, we know the body’s devoting energy more towards dealing with whatever stress and in front of it right now. So, you know, as a single gate, I think it’s an incredibly powerful a marker and there’s, there’s been research on for 50 years. I mean this isn’t something that’s some new thing they just invented. This has been around since the fifties and sixties. It’s been very, very well researched and documented. So I think as again, as a single number, it is the most valuable thing we have at this point.

Brad: And do you think the smartphone technology were. All we need is a chest strap and a $10 App, uh, is going to give you accurate readouts and accurate tracking?

Joel: No. I think accuracy, if you’re using one of the better gesture, perhaps like the polar and a few other ones that are really good at actually giving you the r interval data and you’re using, you know, a good app. My old original in his bio forest HRV, which certainly was documented, validated then yeah, you can get accurate readings. Again, I think the tricky part isn’t the reading. It’s understanding what that information means, right? It took me quite awhile to use HRV and see what the numbers meant because you know it’s going to be constantly changing the body’s dynamic, right? I could measure my blood pressure, I can measure my heart rate or conversion rate via conceal, it seems every day, but if I didn’t really know what to look for or what the trends meant, then it wouldn’t really be able to do much with it. So I think, yeah, great. A good heart rate, you know, chest strap on iphone APP, you can get the HRV number accurately, you know, but again, it’s, it’s what does that number actually mean and that’s where the, the trickier part comes into play.

Brad: And so to optimize this, you’re going to establish a baseline I imagine is the most important so that you’re not comparing yourself to your training partner who’s always 10 beats higher than you are 10 points higher. And then where do you go from, uh, you know, let’s, let’s say I’ve been doing this every day. I’d actually did it everyday for three years when I first got excited about HRV and I kind of got lazy about it in, in, in recent times. And bring me to another question is, um, how do you kind of stack that up with just the general desire to train as Kelly Starrett says?

Joel: Sure. So, you know, a couple of things. Uh, really what that information means depends on how you interpreted, right? There’s, there’s lots of agreement was also some disagreement in terms of how you actually interpret that data. So when I built bio force back in 2011, 12, it was, that’s essentially what we did is we looked at your seven day average lift their head, what’s your personal baseline? And we looked at what your own kind of variability and when you would see changes outside of your normal, you know, whether that was a change in increase or change in a decrease that Jeremy mentioned, decreased amount of recovery that your body was starting to become a bit more fatigued. And over the years we refined that algorithm and got a little bit better and better with it. Um, and then the new one morpheus takes, it just gives you a recovery score and it’s an easier thing for people to interpret as a recovery score. The actual, uh, you know, just HRV number. So

Brad: What else are you putting into morpheus besides the HRV numbers? Okay. So

Joel: let’s look at by things basically looking at HRV, it’s looking at your sleep. Does that self reported sleep? It’s either self reported or if you have a fitbit or an APP or any other wearable, it’ll pull data in from other wearables or the kid or iphone, whatever. You’re man. Um, it tracks your activity and the same thing. So activity, it can be sleep, it could be your phone, it could be an know fitbit, it could be just whatever you’re using for your activity or you know, if you’re not using anything to track your phone’s movement, um, and that’s looking at training. So if you’re wearing a heart rate monitor in your workouts or your workout activity and then self reported markers of soreness and, and the nutrition quality and those sorts of markets as well. So it’s five different categories and then it takes all that and it gives you a recovery score and then it takes that.

Joel: And getting back to your question about what do you, how do you rectify that with a desire to train, right? So it’ll give you three heart rate zones for the day. And that’s the biggest thing I wanted to help people understand is just because your recovery is on the lower side, doesn’t mean you can’t train and just means you need to take that into consideration. And so it gives you three heart rate zones, basic fee. It gives you a blue zone, which is a heart rate zone or level of intensity that will promote recovery, you know, provided you don’t go do two hours of it, it’ll give you a green zone that’s intended more for development of conditioning in aerobic fitness. And then we’ll give you a red zone, which is really your top end intensity zone where, you know, if you spend too much time in that zone, especially when you’re already low, you will start to fatigue and over train.

Joel: So, um, you know, again, I wanted to help people bridge that gap. So there’s, there’s rarely a time when I tell someone, hey, you don’t train. It’s more about what’s an appropriate level of training. So it’s, it’s more about just figuring out what’s the right amount of intensity or what’s the right volume for today based on where my body’s at. And something that I always try to help people understand is people have this misconception that recovery equals performance, right? So they think, oh my recovery is low today so I shouldn’t be able to perform well. So they go into the gym, they performed fine. Like, oh, well this thing’s not accurate because my recovery, so that was lower by still performed. Okay. That’s not really what recovery is measuring. Again, recovery is measuring. Where’s your body trying to put energy into, right? It’s, it’s measuring essentially where’s your bank account in terms of energy.

Joel: If your bank accounts on the lower side of recovery, then you have less energy to vote to recovery, which just means it’s going to take you a longer amount of time to recover from a given workout. It doesn’t mean you can’t perform. Your body can overcompensate and perform with a gun to your head. Anytime your body can get into a sympathetically driven state and you can perform. It’s just a question of how long is it gonna take you to recover from that. Your recovery is in the low side and you go do a high intensity workout. It might take, you know, two, three, four days to get back to normal versus if you did that same workout in a high recovery state, you might be able to cover in 48 hours and get back into it. So recovery doesn’t necessarily equal performance. Now if your recovery is low for a week straight, yeah, you’re probably gonna feel the effects of it, but if your recovery as low on a given day doesn’t mean you can’t go to the gym and train hard.

Joel: It’s just a question of is that the right choice or are you better off, you know, dial it back a bit so you can come back the next day or the following day then and then do higher intensity workout when you can recover faster from it because to me the more you can train and recover, the better results you’re going to see. But if you have to train and take three days to recover because you didn’t train when you were ready for it, then you’re ultimately decrease in how much you can train and get out of it. So, you know, I think it’s about making sure that you train when your body is going to recover the fastest from that training versus just try and train as hard as I can every single day or versus trying to guess basically.

Brad: So the green light to really hit it hard will only come when you have this super high.

Joel: Yeah. When your body companies score super high HRV basically when your body is not always high HRV, it could be within your body’s normal ranges is probably the better way to look at it. So that’s another misconception is people always think how HRV is always good. Low HRV is always bad. That’s not necessarily the case because a very high HRV indicates hey, the body’s really trying to recover. It’s the building and everything it has into recovery. So that’s doing that for a reason, right? It’s trying to get you back to your normal kind of baseline range. If it’s really too high, it’s telling you there’s a reason it’s related to high. It’s sympathetic, parasympathetic dominant because because you’re, you’re a mass or whatever, so you’ll see actually in periods where your body’s trying to recover and vice versa. We’ll see very low HRV scores where your body is deal with the stressor right now where it’s devoting energy into dealing with something.

Joel: The HRV is more of the high interviews, like I’m still in the process of recovering from that something that you did to me, so in either case really high or really low is where we see decreased recovery. It’s not always the case that higher is better, lower is worse. It’s more about in your kind of normal baseline range, tells you your body’s probably ready to go do it again because it’s not dealing with something or still recovering from something.

Brad: So we better get a baseline arrange over time duration to make sure that my range is 74 to 78 as 10 day moving average.

Joel: Now of course use the seven days, so it’s looking at your kind of your seven to 10 day moving average and what is your normal range? Seventy four to 77 and we also look at your standard deviation, so some people just have a naturally bigger variation from one day the neck. So we look at your own standard deviation. What’s your normal variance? And when you exceed that normal variants, again, either high or low. That’s essentially where we derive that your recovery is not what it could be on the lower side,

Brad: so that, that elevated HRV score indicating that maybe I’m parasympathetic dominant and uh, if you’re not following this too well, it’s like the rest and digest is the parasympathetic and the fight or flight as the sympathetic. We want those to work in harmony in the autonomic nervous system. But, and we’re, we’re usually, we’re striving to get a little more parasympathetic balance because we’re usually in this fight or flight state and hectic modern life. Um, so if I’m, if I’m parasympathetic dominant, it’s the body’s reaction to let’s say a, a major bout of overstress or something. And then I’m spiking my number of high proud of myself. Go out there and slam myself again.

Joel: Yeah. You’re still in the process of recovering, right? You’re right. It’s not that you’ve, uh, you know, you haven’t fully recovered. That’s why they was so much more elevated than usual because it’s trying to get back to normal. It just hasn’t been able to yet.

Brad: Okay. Why don’t you tell me that, man. Three years ago I didn’t realize that because, um, you know, that’ll, that’ll trick the willing athlete to go out there. I mean, and, and I remember reading a article with one guy who invented one of the HRV technology things and he’s like, the great thing is even if you’re feeling lousy and you have a high score, you know, you can go out there and hammer. I’m like, Whoa, Whoa, whoa.

Joel: Yeah. That’s one of the most frustrating things to me is you know, as you’ve seen HRV proliferate, proliferate and be more common, you’ve seen people create. APPS are becoming so called experts that really don’t know what they’re talking about. I hate to say it, but you have some of these popular out city of preaching. This idea of the high HRV is great, low attribute is bad. It’s never really that simple in the body, right? Your normal is good, abnormal is using not so good news. There’s usually an amount that’s appropriate and then when you go above that threshold, there’s probably a reason for that. The other really interesting thing is they’re looking more and more the connection between the immune system with HRV, uh, and basically what you find is, is that the sympathetic system is inherently inflammatory. So when the sympathetic system, the fight or flight system is on your immune system is also turned on in heightened. And if you think about that from a biological perspective, fight or flight was for an emergency scenario. And where are you more likely to be exposed to pathogens, to damage the muscle tissue in that fight or flight scenario, right? So you want that nervous system in a heightened state when you’re in a fight or flight scenario. So we are inherently sympathetically dominant or inherently in that stage, we’re also inherently inflammatory in that state. Now the interesting thing is they’ve done plenty of research now where they can put you into a mental, a mental challenge, or doing some sort of math problem. That’s

Brad: video game in the next room.

Joel: Yeah, exactly. So, and they’ll measure it and what are called cytokines or your inflammatory, and they will show you that your mental stress during this task will rise. There’s levels of inflammatory markers which entering those I’ve got some of them, they’ll show a continual rise or the level of increased markers reps two, three hours even after the stressor has passed, so you can sit there and be very mentally stressed out over something. Even after that’s gone away. It can take two, three hours for some of those inflammatory markers to return back to baseline level.

Brad: Well, you see people coming back from a traffic altercation, fender bender, and they’re shaking, telling the story. It might be okay, yeah, I’m fine. Well, why? Why are you shaking? Because you’re still. You still drugged by the massive fight or flight dose. Powerful thing though, is that right?

Joel: Parasympathetic system essentially blocks the increase in these sympathetically driven inflammatory markers, so inherently the parasympathetic rest and digest is anti inflammatory in nature and they think largely that’s a big part of why higher HRV scores and lower resting heart rates are protective against cardiovascular disease, protective against stroke, protective against diabetes, so inherently people with higher vo, two Max Aerobic fitness, higher HRV. These people tend to have far less strokes and diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and all these things for a reason, and probably a big part of that reason is because they are better at shutting off stress. They’re better at being anti inflammatory. They don’t let their bodies get into this chronic inflammatory state. That happens when you can’t shut that off every day. So that’s why another reason why you shouldn’t use a powerful markers because if you do look at your average baseline over time, you know someone with an average baseline of 60 and we must more likely to have problems down the road than somebody just got a baseline of 80 or 90. The same thing as someone who’s VO2 Max is on the higher end, has a much lower risk of cardiovascular disease in somebody who’s Vo two Max on the lower end. So aerobic fitness is inherently protective because it’s inherently drives that parasympathetic nervous system, which inherently gives you a better ability to cope with stress because you can shut off inflammation. That’s what it comes down to. So it’s fascinating stuff.

Brad: So I guess if you’re a hardcore crossfitter, endurance athlete, triathlete, ultra runner in this, immersed in this world, and you a track HRV for five years, you probably, if you’re doing it correctly, would want to see a general upward trend in that baseline. Yup.

Joel: And if, I mean there’s just. Again, there’s. There’s always too much of it, but yes, you want to see a higher average HRV then

Brad: and if, if it’s, if it’s. If you dropping three or four beats or three or four points every, every year, you’re probably showing an overly stressful lifestyle pattern.

Joel: Yup. We have. That’s why we have about a million and a half data points every from every age group imaginable. And so we ran a whole bunch of math on it and looked at kind of the average change over lifespan or over a period of time for men and women. And we sent. You saw, I don’t want to bastardize the numbers, I could give you the actual numbers, but somewhere like a two and four percent decrease a year. Once you start hitting the middle, you’re like late thirties, early forties. You’d see this very linear trend and the change in HRV or and against as we age, we just inherently less effective at dealing with stress. We get inherently less effective at repairing ourselves. Recovery is one of the biggest reasons we age because our cells don’t turn over as effectively. Right? They take much longer for cell turnover and a half and it takes a lot longer for us to recover from a given level of stress.

Joel: We get much more damage from oxidation and inflammation and that’s ultimately why we all die at something a cancer or cardiovascular disease or some combination thereof. It’s just because our tissues get worse and worse and recovery and it’s interesting that you can actually see this. We look at recovery, you can look at the HRV decrease as we age. It’s a. it’s a clear correlation there for a reason.

Brad: So what’s a strategy to guard against that in terms of our commitment to fitness?

Joel: I mean there’s lots of them, right? And then number one is just being mindful of of what’s appropriate for yourself on a given day. And you can actually, again, like I said, you can develop higher HRV by developing the aerobic side of the equation, but obviously if you do way too much high intensity and way too much training, you’re not really going to increase that. You’re going to make it fundamentally worse. So I think the goal for most people should be develop a level of aerobic fitness that’s cardiovascular protective and you can see that in HRV, so in, in every system out there uses a different numbers. You really can’t compare the activity score to another because we’re all doing math and given you some interpretation of that. But with bio for us, we would always say try to hit like an 80 and the 80 score and bio for us was generally speaking in that range of cardioprotective a levels and you know, when he endurance athletes in the eighties, nineties and even sometimes above. So it’s, it’s, you know, training intelligently to develop your aerobic fitness and strength training and all that plays a role but aerobic fitness is always going to be the most important. It’s just a matter of managing the volume and intensity in your nutrition and sleep and all those things appropriately to see that, to see that increase in the see that a baseline maintained over time as you age, so you don’t get that chronic decrease and decrease and worse results over time. So it’s, it always starts with managing volume intensity. That’s the most important thing you can do.

Brad: Ah, so the aerobic fitness you’re saying is, is more important in this context then developing your strength, power resistance training

Joel: For this purpose? Yes. So there’s actually a ton of athletes

Brad: because we’re measuring our, our cardiovascular function,

Joel: cardiovascular function is tied to HRV and it’s tied to the parasympathetic system. So for example, I’ve got a paper, uh, they looked at, I think it was 11 or 12 different studies in life expectancy and athletes and they looked at power lifters, weightlifters a during as athletes. Wow. Interesting. And out of that, the only group of athletes that showed an increase in life expectancy were endurance athletes

Brad: increase over the general population? The rest of them had, some of them had worse. Some of them actually,

Joel: some populations actually had lower life expectancies in the average population, so basically what you find with the study found was that the average person who’s active, so just being active and there was some number of steps per day or some self quantified measure activity being active can increase your life expectancy by about two to four years just over the average population who is sedentary, right? Just being active and just living a normal lifestyle, two to four years and during the athletes that have anywhere from four to eight years longer than the average person, which is significant, significant amount of years when you’re talking about the average person in their seventies, you’re averaging four to eight years longer than that can be up 10 percent longer lifespan, but some of the athletic populations were actually lower than the average person and lower than the average person who is active.

Brad: So what speed golfers in there say, hey,

Joel: I don’t know about that. I hope it was entering review though. It was, you know, it was a med analysis, so it was a review of several different papers, but I think strength training, I don’t want to downplay. It’s important. It’s important for, for um, you know, maintain muscle mass, maintaining body composition and all those things play a role as well. There’s some stuff out there. Looking at A. I think there was a big study published not too long ago. It looked at the bone density and muscle mass did play a role in life expectancy but the reality was it was most likely in my reading of the paper and other ones because if you had muscle mass and bone density, you could be more active, right? If you didn’t have the bone density of the bone mass, muscle mass to move around, you are going to be more sedentary. So you weren’t going to actually get the activity. You weren’t going to get the movement which you need to stay alive. So, uh, you know, I think strength training is certainly important. It’s, it’s, I don’t want to downplay that, but it’s largely needs to be there because we need to keep moving and we need to have cardiovascular fitness. That’s why we uh, you know, that’s why we stay alive. We move and we see a lot of people become more sedentary as they retire. They don’t last long. It’s the people to keep working and have hobbies and get out and move around the, you know, they tend to stick around a lot longer because we’re designed to move as a human being and we have to have the capacity to do that. And at the end of the day, your cardiovascular systems, which rides all that

Brad: well, it seems like it’s all tied together. I mean if you’re eating a bad diet and becoming insulin resistant, then you literally do not have the energy in your bloodstream to get off the couch and you’re exhausted or if you walk around the block because you can’t burn fat. And so yeah, I mean just like, you know, maintaining muscle mass, bone density so you can, you can move. So you can see can last longer than a four minute walk or whatever. Y

Joel: Yeah, interesting. I was looking through some stuff looking at how the dopamine signaling changes in people that are obese in for some reason there. There’s the think that the dopamine rewards us to move or to do anything really. It’s kind of how the brain decides what work is worth moving for, right? Because work takes energy and the brain has to be intelligent about how do I expand my energy? I’ve got limited supply so they’ve actually looked at like animals and how they decide like if I can’t find food, do I go spend the work to go 20 miles to go look for more food? Because if I can’t find food there that I’m screwed, I’m going to run out of energy. I’m gonna die basically. So there’s all this. A foraging optimization where animals doping systems are basically designed to allow them to analyze like where should I go? How far should I go to look for food, profitable survival. And we’re kind of wired like that too. We decide like what’s worth expanding energy for and I think this is a lot of reasons why you see people train for two months in January, February and then stop working out because as soon as they step on the scale and it didn’t change, their brain goes, wait a minute, why am I going to gym again? That’s not worth it. I just worked my ass off for four weeks and the scale. Then budget outs, I’m not doing this anymore. The couch and watch TV. That’s way more fun. Right? So I think your average person as soon as they start to see diminishing returns a fitness, because fitness isn’t linear. You know every time you step on the scale, you’re not going to see incremental decrease in weight.

Joel: If that’s your only goal, you’re not gonna. See the bar way go up every single time you go to the gym. So as soon as our brains start to see, wait a minute, putting all this work and I’m expending all this energy and not seeing any benefit, why am I gonna keep doing this? And they they, they lose motivation to do it. It’s a very fascinating thing, but going back to the the obese population, they think that a lot of it has to do with doping stops, were boarding activity the way that it should and it starts rewarding and eating in a much more persistent manner because doping rewards both, right? It rewards eating food and rewards, do an exercise because we have to eat to replenish, we have to move traditionally to go get food nowadays. We sit there in the order of more phones, but you know, traditionally you had to move to go get something to eat or to go kill your food and they had to actually be motivated to eat it. So there’s this whole dopamine interaction of rewarding both activities and movement and eating and they think there’s some disorder there and essentially telling the brain to be rewarded for movement. Instead. It’s just rewarding the eating over and over again and people completely lose the motivation to be active. Right? And they just sit there and they rewarded to eat over and over again. So it’s a fascinating thing of how our biology was originally designed to help us go out and find food and then be hungry enough to eat it.

Brad: I came on the same. It’s all the same road down to the road to go get food and be physically active for tied inextricably. And now they’re not.

Joel: Exactly. And so now you see the, you know, you see people sitting there and ordering food in their phone and be less and less active and it’s, it’s a weird juxtaposition where the same chemical can essentially reward two totally opposite behaviors. And you can see that when there’s an imbalance there for whatever reason, you know, people become much less rewarded to, to move and they sit there and eat all day long.

Brad: It’s probably a slippery slope downward when you first start going down the route of eating without exercising. And it’s Kinda like when you add a belly fat, as the males go into the advancing decades, you add a little bit of belly fat. It’s actually secretes inflammatory cytokines which causes you to add more belly fat. And I’m also, it’s

Joel: a cycle, was another interesting study is so they took people to a gym and they said, okay, we want you to work out. And then they said, okay, we want you to estimate essentially your calorie burning me read this one. I think I mentioned this somewhere to study, write on the paper. And then they took you to a buffet and they said, we want you to eat the same galleries that you felt like you just burned. Ambiguous showed us people ate four times more than they actually burn, even though they thought they were right. They were trying to have a level amount. They’ll say they thought they burned one amount and they thought that a the same amount, but they actually ate four times more than they burned. So we’re probably inherently hardwired a bit to, you know, to overeat, especially when we’re overstressed we’re, we’re protective against, you know, losing, losing muscle mass. And we’re more protective against dying from starvation than we are being fat. So our brains are probably inherently hardwired to want to.

Brad: Sure. Right. The compensation theory of exercise where the more depleting the exercise event is, the more you’re triggered, your appetite hormones are spiked and you go and overeat, uh, you know, on the idea that you might try to do it again the next day. That kind of goes hand in hand with that, um, additive model and the constrained model of energy expenditure that’s referenced in your article,

Joel: the more you burden them where you want to put it back in, right? Yeah. It’s one of those things, again, that’s why that’s against why you have to balance your intensity and your recovery. Anything else? Because if you’re, if your recovery is low, what’s it gonna do? It’s gonna mean inherently make you wanna eat more, right? Because you’re in recovery debt, you, your body wants more energy to devote back towards recovery. It’s going to try to get you to intake as much as you can. So

Brad: I guess that’s maybe okay in a certain context, right?

Joel: Either the question of how much you know, maybe you overdo it, you know, are we good at judging the right amount? It’s. Well, I think part of our problem too is portion sizes have gotten so ridiculous, right? If you go, I’ve done a lot of traveling. If you go to a lot of places like Japan or even Europe, like their portions are much more., at least they used to be much more restrained compared to ours. My Japanese food now maybe they’ve changed now. Friends with fighters would always come over here. Then because America is such big Porsche and driving, they just couldn’t believe. Some of the dinners sizes, you know, you go out to a normal chain restaurant here and there. You’d be getting these meals are three times the size of what they will do is would be. So

Brad: Also when you eat quality food, like you go get a grass fed steak or a pasture raised chicken at the farmer’s market. I remember buying my first one and the guy’s like, yeah, it’s $14. I’m like, what? Because the chickens five bucks at the store. We all know how much a chicken costs. We don’t know how big it is. We’re envisioning and in our mind, and the guy hands me this thing that fits in my palm, but you go home and cook that thing and it was so rich and delicious that the much smaller animal that was naturally raised is just as satisfying as the more bulky, that kind of blander tasting a regular conventional chicken with hormones, pesticides, antibiotics in there.

Joel: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that’s the food quality is going down. Food portion sizes have up and we’re more stressed than ever. Right? So is there any wonder why we have the problem in our health and wellness that we do?

Brad: Same with, same with exercise quality, man. We’re just throwing stuff up against the throwing spaghetti on the fridge and seeing if it’ll stick without, without respecting that. Uh, and that recovery aspect. One thing I wanted to talk to you about was the, um, uh, the” rebound training” uh, because since, since we last talked, I made a concerted effort to test some new theories in my general exercise pattern. And that is to have more time periods, whether you can call it a day or let’s say a 36 hour time block where I wasn’t doing a whole heck of a lot rather than getting up every single morning for my life and doing that easy 20 minute jog, no big deal. And then maybe some, some form of strength training here and there are doing three workouts a week and then taking it down to two and making them a more difficult, more ambitious, maybe taking some days off from the patterned aerobic exercise. And I feel like I certainly haven’t lost anything from reducing the overall volume out there. Um, but I feel like when I do a hard workout, I consider recovery to be lazing around. And then I’m reading this article going, Oh crap, this guy’s got us in the gym doing these elaborate setups to do things like prime, the central nervous system for recovery. So tell me what rebound training is all about.

Joel: Essentially what I started doing, they use HRV for so long was I started looking at what are things that we see that caused people’s HRV to kind of go up as her indication of, you know, putting more energy towards recovery, essentially turning on the recovery system we’ve talked about and then seeing them recover. Well the following day, and then I started trying out different things and the gym and essentially found a combination of breathing exercises that turned on the parasympathetic system. Getting blood flow going through the system. Just movement and activity in different patterns, but doing it in a lower impact type of way. So things that minimize the ecentric pounding, so medicine ball throws and low impact stuff like the bike or versa climber or things like that. And then, uh, you know, strength training but only for limited number of sets and then going through a really comprehensive cool-downs of bring everything back down.

Joel: I just kind of started playing around with different workout structures and patterns to see could we get the body to shift into that recovery state quicker. And essentially that’s kind of where this idea of of rebound train was born. It was just can we use exercise as a tool to speed the recovery process up? And the funny thing was you’d always kind of see when you’re tapering, right, like you see your recovery surge, but you start tapering and usually that says decreasing volume. The question is, are you, is your recovery going up because you’re suddenly kind of volume back or because you were just doing these shorter know more intensely focused but less volume based workouts. And part of it I think is that. So essentially the, the whole thing is just like, can we use exercise by introducing just enough of it to promote blood circulation and blood flow and some get some hormones going and get our autonomic nervous system shift into that parasympathetic state without going so much over that.

Joel: We burn so much energy that again, now we’re actually taking away from recovery. So again, that’s kind of where this whole idea of rebound dream was born. It was just this light bulb went off as I started to look at some of HRV data. And I started looking at some of the, uh, the military had done some testing this area and we basically just saw that there was actually some patterns to, to what we could do to get the body to shift more into that state quicker. And that’s where the, the, the template or the pattern I put together to get a rebound training, think anything is, it’s flexible, you know, it’s not like you have to do X, Y, and Z exercise, like you have to have 10 different specialized pieces of equipment. I mean, you really don’t. It’s more about just choosing the intensity that’s appropriate, going through some of the breathing and mobility drills that uh, uh, I worked with Mike Robertson, Bill Hartman to, to go through and practice and implement and then, you know, doing some strength training that’s primarily concentric base.

Joel: So I Olympic lift or deadlift or something primarily. Well, you have less of an essential glow to it because it’s where more of the damage goes. Uh, ended up comes into play. So it’s just been a journey of figuring out how do we use exercise as a positive reinforcement of recovery rather than something that takes away from it and so far it’s been really effective for a ton of people I use all the time and we’ve got a couple of thousand more pc users that were experimenting more and more with and with Morpheus gives you your active recovery zone, right? So you just go in the recovery zone for 20, 30 minutes and go through these exercises and you see recovery score to go up and you see the benefits of it. So it’s, it’s been really cool to start implementing and something I think more and more people should, should do.

Joel: And I think you’ll, you’ll could be fine. Hey, I come out of the gym feeling way better. You know, it’s also more motivating to come out of the gym. Like wow, I feel good right now because I think that’s part of our problem too is someone was hardcore and exercise. They don’t care if they feel like they’re still going to do it because that’s, that’s what they do, you know. But most people out there, but they go in the gym everyday and they kill themselves. It’s not going to last forever. That’s why, you know, I don’t want to bag on crossfit, but I think you saw so much turnover and clientele in the crossfit scenario because

Brad: That’s the nicest way I’ve ever heard you say. It’s like when I talk about the team and training, you know, the marathon training group at the purple shirts, turnover in clientele rather than the whole shit overly stressful training program that ruins people and spits them out the back.

Joel: Because you think because you go into this thinking like, Oh, if I work my ass off, I’m going to see the results. I’m gonna feel great, but that never happens. Right? You work your ass off, you see some results for awhile, you get excited and then you’re like, wait a minute, my shoulder hurts and my back hurts. I don’t really want you to do that anymore. And so we’ve, again, if your only thought of the gym is this place to go, get my ass kicked and feel tired and walk out the door, most people are gonna. Stop doing that sooner or later, you know, if you’re not getting paid for it or you’re not driven by performance goals, you’re venturing like, this sucks. I don’t want to do this for sure.

Brad: And it’s not even, it’s not even conscious. This is a disaster that we see playing out in modern life. I mean, you know, well meaning people going and get slammed and it’s like, hey, why? Why are you so lazy? Why aren’t you exercising? Well, there was a gosh darn good reason because it’s too painful.

Joel: Yeah. So the whole idea of rebound train is, hey, we can go in the gym, come out feeling better, too friendly place. There’s like balloons and Joe. Joe Puts up the loons on rebound training day. It doesn’t have a place you go in and get killed. It can be a place you’d go in and I come out like, oh my joints feel better. I feel loose. I feel more energetic. And that’s really kind of what the defined important have a read on session should be. Should we be 30 to 40 minutes? You should be more mobile. You’d feel more energized and you should feel good when you’re finished with it, and if you did the protocol properly, then you’ll find that that’s the case. So you know, I think most people, your average population versian twice, twice a week of what we call high intensity and twice a week you rebound training four days a week is what most people who have normal jobs and live normal lives, they’re going to benefit tremendously more from that than trying to go into a gym for 45 minutes, an hour and kill themselves every day.

Brad: Just, I mean what practically happens is they go four times a week and do for mediocre work. Absolutely. You know, they’re smart enough not to try to kill themselves. They don’t have that extreme type A category of those people, but they’re going in, they’re well meaning going to crossfit and they get a little bit of a, you know, the stress hormone buzz, the endorphins, but they’re never showing their true potential. Nor are they recovering.

Joel: Yeah, exactly. It’s kind of goes back to the whole high level. I mean, it’s push your body to to enough level for it to stimulate improvement or fitness and then let it recover and then do that over and over again versus like you said, these four mediocre workouts where you never really go hard enough to push yourself to get better, but you never really recovered from it either, so you kind of stuck in this middle ground, so like I liked the idea of a red line workout, which I call it your higher intensity workout and a rebound workout which helps you buy your car from mean. I like the sequence that sequence it that way, so do your heart and tie intentionally hard training session one day, followed up with the rebel workout. Maybe take a day off and repeat that for your average person, you know, to to those high intensity redline workouts and to rebuild workouts is going to be tremendously beneficial.

Joel: They’re going to actually enjoy going to the gym because I really only push themselves and feeling fatigue twice. They’re gonna, they’re gonna feel better after the rebound workouts and they’re going to feel like they can sustain that over time, which is the other thing is that as people’s schedules or you know, they are, they are the, most people aren’t going to be in the gym six days a week at work, 40, 50, 60 hours of kids, you know, four days a week. I feel like it’s a reasonable goal that most of them can hit. And particularly if the rebound transitions are a little bit of shorter end and uh, you know, I think for your, for your average person in the street, that sort of schedule is as reasonable and it’s maintainable and it’s gonna. It’s gonna deliver benefits,

Brad: What about the other three days?

Joel: A reactive move around, move around, you know, if you have some spores from hobby you enjoy doing and then go do that and nothing, just just, you know, relax and enjoy your life.

Brad: That sounds like way to revolutionize a lot of the problems in the fitness industry. And then due to the nature of this rebound training, it’s kind of sophisticated. It’s specific and you have some protocols. So maybe the personal trainer could become an expert in that and then justify their existence. You need help when you’re going on the high intensity stuff, but generally we kind of go in and think, oh, I’m just going to spin on the bike for half hour today. I don’t need to pay my trainer to sit next to me, but maybe we’re going to the next level here.

Joel: No, I agree a hundred percent. And that’s something I’ve thought a lot about

Brad: You’re training people to do this, right?

Joel: Coach who had been through my own condition certifications, that is one of the next things we’re working on is is a gym trainer coaching version of Morpheus were a personal trainer or yoga instructor. Anybody could see all this data from anyone, their clientele so they could see their sleep, they can see their training from before. They could see their activity and then they could take them to rebound workout again based on their own heart rate zones, their own recovery levels. So personalizing. Again, I think not just personalizing high intensity, but personalize and recovery is really a key component of this and figuring out what your heart rate for recovery might be totally different than mine. Maybe you’re older and in better shape or who knows you’re more predominant strength Athlete, we’re going to have different recovery zones. Not all going to be the exact same, so I think teaching trainers, teaching coaches, group fitness instructors how to build these programs into their jams, into their classes is hugely important to. I’m actually working with a lifetime fitness right now to to look at doing that. A large scale and they’ve got 100,000 plus people that go through their PT program a year, so I think you’re seeing the gyms and trainers are starting to realize, wait a minute, like beating people up every day. It’s not the best longterm client retention a idea in the world. So do we really want our people just going to float tank and not spending time in our gym? No. We want people in our gym so I think you’re seeing these gyms and trainers trying to figure it out.

Brad: Wait a minute. Oh, we better get some float tanks in here. He asked Debbie Potts gym down down the road in Bellevue. She’s getting a infrared saunas in there. She has an infrared saunas and the, the, the bouncy trampoline. Is that called, I mean, don’t they call that rebound workout or maybe that’s part of, part of your rebound recovery for them to be supposed to be for the lymphatic system, you know,

Joel: I’ve tried it, but I think all those tools and modalities and there’s nothing wrong with float tanks and those are the good things that use as well. Um, but I think your average trainer doesn’t have access to that. You have two persons, not gonna spend $300 a month doing float tank stuff, but they can get in the gym and they can use equipment that’s already there. So I think those sorts of Saunas and, and float tanks and meditation, those are all great things. But again, on a practical level, you’re not going to do that once a week or twice a week. Most people just can’t afford it or it’s already spent the time doing it. And I think there’s just as much or sometimes more benefit in using training as a tool because we can accomplish a lot in terms of the respiratory function, blood flow and strength development and all these sorts of things and uh, in that format. So, you know, it’s, it’s a, it’s a powerful thing. I think we need to get more, more coaching traders out there, excited about it and doing it. And the funny thing is as soon as they try themselves are like, wait a minute, I feel feel better. And when they feel that that change and that improvement in how they feel because they’re starting to focus on recovery, then it’s much easier to get your clients do the same thing.

Brad: I’m, I’m intrigued because, man, to date here in my life, recovery has mainly for me been about laying around and a lot of it’s due to feeling, uh, you know, abnormal level of fatigue at rest. I’m not at my best today. I feel like crap at my desk and then I’m sore because I did a lot of loading with a sprint workout or something. And so I make the decision that maybe the best thing for me is a walk around the block or a bike ride that lasts 15 minutes, just putzing around and um, I’m trying to make an informed decision here. But is there a way that maybe I could explore doing like, like you mentioned the article, doing the deadlift only the race and then dropping the weight so you’re not, you’re not inviting any more additional soreness?

Joel: Yeah, there’s, there’s absolutely way it’s template put together. It’s just, it’s literally just being strategic about how you approach training recovery. So again, our rebound training sessions, should it be 30 to 40 minutes, they’re breathing exercises, some kind of cardiovascular work in the lower intensity. And then strength training along with the cool down. I mean it’s, it’s get the sweat going and you get some, get the mobility increase, get the breathing function working.

Brad: And so you’re saying, hey, parasympathetic, come, come talk to me because I’m not stressing myself, but I am moving my body and doing all these genetically optimal behaviors.

Joel: Is exactly also some some intelligence behind how we do some of the interval training workouts because one of the things I’ve discovered over the years is that being able to control your heart rate is a skill, right? Being able to go up the heartrate on the 1:50, and then bring it back to 1:30 as quickly as possible. Some of that, the fitness level thing, because the more robots fit you are the fastest come down. Some of it’s also just a skill learned skill of being able to turn off that stress response and relaxed quickly. So part of how we’ve built rebound train intervals in there called recovery intervals or temporary roles, wherever you want to call them, is driving your heart rate up to a certain zone and then allow it to come back down as quickly as possible. And if you can learn that technique of bringing your heart rate down quickly, you’re essentially teaching your body how to shut off that stress response that’s sitting there at work. I’m saying

Brad: challenge you’re doing during the workout and you’re looking at your watch and we’re making yourself relaxed like a competition. Love it. Yeah, there’s,

Joel: there’s, there’s, there’s a distinct skill in learning how to shut off that stress response and recover. So you’ll find people initially suck at it and they’ll kind of sit there and sit there and sit there. Eventually, once you get much better at it, you’ll see your heart dropping extremely quickly. So we’ll teach people essentially over time to be able to change your heart rate dynamically. I call it dynamic energy control, for lack of a better term. It’s being able to control that heart rate and control your energy expenditure. So if you can do that in the gym, you can start to learn how to do that outside of the gym. So maybe I’m frustrated at work. Maybe I’m pissed off about traffic. If I can learn how to shut off that stress and learn how to recover from that, I’m going to be able to bring my heart rate back down significantly better, keep it from going up and avoid those, you know, inflammatory markers being produced and be able to be better lingering.

Joel: Yeah. Just be able to cope with life better. Right? So I think those really value and rebound training, not just from the workout standpoint but from developing that skillset of, Hey, I can control my stress, better, control my heart rate, I control my response. You know, if you look at a lot of athletes that perform at the highest levels, they’re very, very good at it, right? They’re very good at being able to handle the stress of competition because they’ve developed that skill, that ability to not let the moment overtake them and to be able to just relax. I be talked about at the beginning here and just handle the situation. So I think there’s value in using training for that specific purpose or your average, your average person. They can develop the ability to turn off the stress and bring them back down and cope with situations better. That’s going to have a profound impact on not just, you know, the gym workout, but everything happens outside of it as well.

Brad: So in the rebound workout, this component of doing a little interval, but it’s not really going to stress you too much, but you’re just trying to spike that heart rate and then work really hard to get it down. Yep.

Joel: Yeah, we do like tend to call them with tempos, like 10 to 12 seconds game for using morpheus. We have a blue zones. We take it up to the blue zone and 10, 12 seconds and then we have usually about 60 seconds, kind of slower active rest. And if someone’s really inexperienced so they’re out of shape, just have them slowly breathe, relax, stop completely. Once they get in better shape, they can actually walk and they can get better at recovering through movement and being able to continue to exercise that muscle. Low intensity is, but uh, you know, it’s breathing, it’s posture, just all these things. They can learn how to control their heart rate. So usually we start with that again, it’s 10, 12 seconds of a, of a moderate intensity, and then bring them back down as quickly as possible and repeat that. And once you can do that, then you can start doing much more complicated version of it. But the whole key is can I drive a hurried up and then you kind of drive it back down. Can you right back up? I backed down and you can get better and better at over time. It’s not just a a fitness level, it’s a skill thing. It’s an actual thing you can practice and get much better at.

Brad: So you’re going to guarantee that I walk into that gym feeling better than when I started on a rebound session. Even if I’m trashed from the previous workouts,

Joel: the more stressed you are, you would actually feel better because you’ve got the blood flow completion.

Brad: I’m going to try it. And then I guess the, the caveat is also if I’m in that kind of state after that hard workout, did I overdo it? Especially as an old guy, I’m, I’m feeling too sore, too tired because I rethink that session, right? I mean,

Joel: again, if you’re tracking recovery with something you will have, but you should have a pretty good gauge of that. But it’s, it’s, you know, it’s more about how, how frequently is that happening, you know, doing it once, you know, maybe once a week, not a huge deal. If you were able to recover from that, but doing it consistently, then absolutely you’ve done too much as it got. I think most, most people in my years of looking at data and talking to people can handle two, what I would call really true, high intensity workouts. People at the peak of their fitness levels and their twenties, the genetic marbles. The world can often get away with three, but your average person who’s not a world champion and there’s something, there’s not in their twenties, it was not on drugs. The average person, you know, twice a week is what most people can really push their body to, uh, you know, to limit up and be able to recover from.

Joel: If you start doing this three, four days a week of trying to get there, you end up, like you talked about with, for mediocre workout. So, you know, I think most people can handle twice a week of trying to really get outside their comfort zone and push themselves where they’ve got to get themselves to three days in between sessions to truly recover from it. And you know, it’s, it’s, it’s funny on a no heartburn, the drugs thing at all. But the reason people take drugs as wide because it allowed them to recover, that’s charger for, that’s what drugs do. So it just shows you the benefits of a bill in your training and building your lifestyle around. And don’t want to just break my body down. I need to get my body to recover as well as they could. And I don’t want to use growth hormone, testosterone, always performance enhancing drugs.

Joel: But I want to do things that I can use naturally. I can use rebound training, I can use nutrition that can use no sleep and meditation. I can use all these things that aren’t performance enhancing drugs. They’re just a natural part of training and being intelligent about it. So, uh, you know, I think we just have to recognize the importance of recovery is where things actually happened this way we already improved. That’s where our strength gets built. That’s where our cardiovascular system gets remodeled. It doesn’t happen in the gym. It happens in between the sessions. I mean, nothing in the gym except for that stimulation. It’s telling the body, hey, do something about this. It’s only when we’re recovering that the body actually is making ourselves more fit or stronger or whatever the case may be. So that is where the actual gains come. It’s not in the gym, it’s outside of the gym. When those things happen,

Brad: and now let’s take energy. They take. Yeah, that’s the, that’s the breakthrough man. I, you come with the magic every time. I’m so glad to meet with you again and I want listeners to go back and listen to our other show on primal blueprint channel. I believe, but Joel Jamison doing great stuff. Eight weeks out.com eight, the number eight weeks out.com article, how to train you recover faster on there and there’s a free route on training template to those of you who want to try it. You can just. We got to try. It just created a whole download. You can

Joel: go through a sample workout. I show you the exercises. We have some videos on there so it had to do it so I can try it for yourself and I guarantee you the more you start to walk out the gym back. Wow. I feel I feel good. I feel better. The more you’ll start to be like, this is something that you started doing anything. It doesn’t even have to be in the gym and sometimes I will go on a 20 minute bike ride, but I’ll do my breathing exercises before we bike ride. I’ll ride it from the gym to end the trail and back and they’ll do a few sets of dead lifts and cool down and then call it. Good. There’s lots of ways to incorporate the sort of stuff.

Brad: You pick it up the dead lifts and then dropping it. Yeah, I do like. Yeah, exactly. And so I quickly that’s because the raising phase is that called concentric. Concentric phase is not tearing up. Muscle fibers essentially will load.

Joel: The eccentric lowering tends lower end because more of the muscle soreness in the muscle damage. If anyone’s ever done a true essentially workout, you know how sore that tends to make you. It just tends to be more of where the muscles resisting stretching and that tends to be where more damage to the muscles actually done. So we’re trying to get the benefits of stimulate the nervous system with less fatigue or soreness. It’s going to go along with it. You know, this concentric only type exercises tend to be really beneficial for that.

Brad: I thought those guys were just showing off when they drop the weight, you know, and then they drop and make a big noise and everyone has to look over

Joel: that. You can do more of them, right? Because if you’re, if you’re not, spend as much energy in the deceleration event, then you can tend to do more reps to the concentric so they have their purpose.

Brad: Joel Jamieson, great time. Thank you so much. Keep up the good work. Go visit the website and read those, those landmark articles like uh, uh, what was it? All pain, no gain. And then the, uh, the rebound stuff that you can download. And then we’ll just dig further into this. I’m all over that. I’m going to go try it man. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Thanks for listening. Everybody thought on.

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